HISTORY IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 33 



proved all he said as forcibly and directly as he stated it, thus giving 

 the simple, every-day man an unshakable confidence. He not only 

 takes testimony, he weighs the veracity and intelligence of his wit- 

 nesses for the public judgment. Having erected on this foundation 

 a set of plain principles, he draws self-evident conclusions and in his 

 generalization he shows every rung of the ladder as he climbs. His 

 style and discussion are direct and cumulative; the current carries 

 him and his reader right onward in a straight line, gathering ever 

 greater force until the flood is as impetuous as the Amazon and like 

 it, too, as broad as the sea. Facts, ideas, explanations, the enormous 

 mass of scientific material, all are clad in a style which, though 

 harking back to Thucydides, Plautus, and Livy, to Petrarch, Dante, 

 and Milton, contains an elusive something which is born from none 

 of these, such is its sweeping passion, its irresistible eloquence. 



This was not inspiration, it was art: the result of infinite pains- 

 taking and a set purpose. On a first rough draft he interlined, erased, 

 corrected, inverted, restored, elaborated, until, as in Balzac's proof, 

 the original \vas overlaid with a mass of words illegible to all except 

 the author, who then at his leisure wrote his printer's copy in a fine, 

 bold, confident hand. Prescott saw a few of these original foolscap 

 sheets and says no one could form any conception of the amount of 

 labor that one of them represents. With the serenity of a great soul, 

 with a religious faith in the power of truth; confident, like Cervantes, 

 that history was sacred because where truth is, there is God, he 

 carried his own conviction into the millions of readers who were 

 fascinated by his art. This art was impersonal, precise, even cold, 

 because it was based on accuracy, on the personal knowledge of 

 contemporaries, and not evolved like that of Carlyle and Froude 

 from the depths of his own consciousness. 



Macaulay's contribution to the science of history was twofold: the 

 knowledge, the insight, and the sympathy, such as were not possible 

 in the revolutionary epoch preceding his, an epoch when, as his pre- 

 decessors said, "hearts rejoice or bleed" as contemporary events 

 illume the past with a light "from the flames of Tophet" in Carlyle's 

 lurid phrase, this, and secondly, the ripened fruit for present use, 

 progress along the lines of tradition, the way to preserve and improve 

 what the fathers had won. 



The second of our great names is that of a man who was still more 

 remote from emotional influence, for he was not a man of affairs, not 

 a statesman, not an acolyte of the social hierarchy, not even an artist, 

 but a scholar, an investigator, and a teacher. Leopold von Ranke 

 revived the past in a spirit which was largely that of an erudite lawyer 

 without a case. His intimate friend was Savigny, and as for him it is 

 the totality of law which had to be studied before further advance 

 could be made, so for Ranke it is the totality of history, carefully 



